CloudFormation and Soccer connection

October 31, 2020

I’m a soccer fan. When I first heard about CloudFormation this image was something that came to my mind.

After learning a few intermediate CloudFormation components like parameters and mappings and custom resources, this is how I think of CloudFormation now.

Some analogies between CloudFormation and Soccer:

• In Soccer, to play a game, all you need is a ball. Similarly in Cloudformation, to launch a stack, the only section required in a template is a resources section with at least 1 resource.

• Stack updates are like player substitution( or even a ball substitution) in a professional Soccer game

• CloudFormation has certain limits just like a professional soccer game. The new per template limits for the maximum number of resources is 500 (previously 200), parameters is 200 (previously 60), mappings is 200 (previously 100), and outputs is 200 (previously 60). This is similar to max numbers of players in a soccer game ( 11 per side), max number of substitute on bench( 7), max allowed substitution per game (3).

I’ll add more analogies in the future when they come to me. If you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments.

By the way, you can read about the new limits for Cloudformation here which lets you work with more resources/parameters/outputs per template.